Each day, students walk into my classroom, pick up a classwork packet (that has the warm-up as well as the classwork for the day in one easy to pick up packet), and work on 2-3 problems. At different parts of the year, this may look different. Most often, it takes two possibilities:

b) Spiraling previous content, particularly from major standards from the Common Core

The key is that one of the problems should have 1 problem that nearly every student can be successful at, and then 1-2 problems that push their thinking and illuminate something new. The first allows kids to feel immediate success at the lesson’s outset, and the second pushes kids to think more deeply about mathematics.

It is incredibly important that warm-ups do NOT take up more than 10 minutes. OK, maybe 11 minutes. But that’s it. Seriously… an opening routine that goes long is the Achilles heel of many lessons, and being smart about how much time to spend here is critical.